When I was young I read lots of books.

My parents let me read what I wanted, which was good, because I had zero interest in sports or any of the other things that usually make boys boys. (I wasn’t into the things that make girls girls, either, in case you’re wondering.) Star Wars had just premiered and in a few years I would discover Dungeons & Dragons and computers, but the books were always at the center.

They were stories about heroes and heroines, protagonists who had to face uncertain situations or dangerous enemies, find advice from the wise, struggle with their own inner weaknesses, and find a way to emerge ethically victorious at the end. There were a lot of such stories, and if you read enough of them at a certain formative time in your life, they shape you. Principle among these for me were the works of Tolkien, with their epic depictions of the noble Men of Numenor and others great and good.

 I found later in life that I had no real-life idols I looked up to or wanted to emulate - mine were all in books. The real human ones - like my father - failed to meet the noble standard of my heroes, the standard I set for myself to reach.

Therein lay the seed of the problem. I hadn’t hit puberty - I bloomed late, and being Autistic, I didn’t catch on to what was happening to me when it did happen. And why would I? You see, in all those books, all those stories, and especially in Tolkien - there is no sex.

 I grew up in a home where sex wasn’t discussed. My Dad’s birds-and-bees talk with me consisted of “mutter mutter mutter keep it in your pants” and I didn’t even understand what “it” he was referring to. So, like Queen Victoria, I determined that I was going to be Good.

And I was. I strove to be perfect in everything I did - “Be perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect”. My father cussed like a sailor, yet not one off-color word passed my lips. I was a straight arrow, square as a cube, insufferably correct, and ethically anchored.

 I was also socially inept and sexually clueless, but I didn’t know that. All I knew was that most people didn’t like me even though I tried hard to be a good person, and the people who didn’t like me liked pop culture and had started going on about this “sex” thing. Fine. If they were going to reject me, I would reject them, and everything they liked.

Fast-forward to college. Sex at last made itself understood to my brain, and it was incompatible with everything I ever read about, admired, aspired to, or wanted. It as carnal, animal, messy. It wasn’t Good. And there was this word associated with it, the word that, then, I considered the worst thing I could say: fuck.

Still more confusing, I found that my curiosity about sex revolved around sex with other men. As a freshman, I went to my first AVS and bought my first gay video.

It changed me. Fuck me! Fuck me! God yes, fuck me! Men actually did the thing my rebel body was shouting for!

But not me. I resisted the rebellion with all of my reason and my willpower. I destroyed the porn tape, glad to be rid of the damn thing... then, before too very long, I bought another. After I purged the indecency from my body I destroyed that one in its turn. But eventually I would get another.

 I was still a coital virgin. In high school I had had a girlfriend who would work my cock with her hand until I came, but I didn’t understand what was happening and certainly didn’t have sex with her. Now I was on a campus where 95% of the students belonged to one of the fraternities or sororities, and sex was everywhere around me. I was a ΓΔΙ (Gamma Delta Iota) - a God Damned Independent - so I wasn’t marinated in sex and alcohol like the rest of the idiots. Yet I had a need in common with them, a drive at that time of life screaming to be met, and I ensured I had no opportunity.

The struggle became a kind of inner warfare that split my mind in two - two different facets of me so incompatible and so consumed with mutual loathing that they persist to this day.

It was only the year after I graduated that a very kind and dear friend ended at least a part of my conflict by seducing me and taking my virginity. I will always be grateful for her mercy, even though the act left me even more confused - was that what everyone got so worked up over? But that’s irrational...

Fast-forward. Graduate school, job, no sex again until marriage (to a gal with a record of some 74 guys she had been with). Sex was expected, and sanctioned, and she had a potty mouth and I suddenly found my resolve slipping. During the moment, to my shock, I even used the F-word.

The sex was good enough to produce two children - my son’s conception was one of the most unusual and memorable ejaculations I’ve ever had - but not good enough to keep her happy. After 11 years, it was over, and at age 37 I looked at myself and found a wreckage of all my early asperations and resolve. I had been dragged down into divorce like any regular person, prey to emotion and physical appetites that I had had to concede to in order to meet her needs. Now there was no her, just me, horny and prone to swear, and now actively thinking of finding out if I really was attracted to other men, and what that would be like. I went to Louisville to a gay bar even though I didn’t drink, got picked up by a guy and fucked the first night, and loved it.

Loved it.

Loved.  It.

Eros was god of love and sex in the ancient Greek world. Among other things, he was said to be the protector of homosexual love between men. Though originally a primordial god, later tradition makes him the offspring of Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty, pleasure and procreation. He carried a bow with arrows that could cause mortals to feel passion beyond reason; the Romans called him Cupid.

 I am convinced that the son of a bitch found me early on and realized that here was a mortal who made a mockery of him and his power (erotic power, named after him). He made his plans right there and then that he was going to take me down about 300 notches by hitting me with arrows at just the right times. By the time he was done with me, he figured, this good, upright, uptight boy would be a sex-addicted slut happily wrapping his tongue around men’s phalluses and taking their seed in his hole so often he would surpass even that whore Messalina.

Fast-forward to now.

His arrows don’t miss, and one offends the gods at his peril. The person I was in the beginning would have been unable to contemplate what he - I - have actually become. Far from his ideals, I have now been trained, and my mind shaped, to accept that I am intended for the random sexual use of strangers, a willing and eager receptacle for their fluid, my body conditioned to accept their rutting, excited by the sound of squishing juice and slapping skin, grunts and groans, and the scent of copulation. He still lives in my mind, proud and undeterred, but pinned down by arrows, while his hated rival has his way with my body and takes full advantage of the corruption Eros wrought.

Had it not been for sex and its nearly irresistible power over the mind, I might have reached some aspect of the refinement I aspired to as a human being. Because of sex, my mind is corrupted, my body has been enjoyed by hundreds of men in degrading ways and I will gladly allow the same from hundreds more, and men know and use me now for what I am...

unrepentantly, and as of this post, a whore.

Thanks a heap, Eros. You motherfucker.